Hi all, new here. I wanted stop by and talk about what I've been experiencing for the past couple of years. I've meant to find a forum like this for a good while, but I just never got around to it. There are a few things happening in my dreams that I don't think are quite normal. In order to help me organize my thoughts, I think its best if I turn this into a list. So here goes.

1. I can control my dreams if I want to, but if I do it too much, I start waking up. I don't know how, but I can start to feel the expenditure of energy as though I was awake. This I think, leads me to wake up. You know how when you're awake and thinking, you can feel yourself using energy. To a certain extent. Well in dreams, maybe you're so relaxed, that you just don't feel it. But when I take control of a dream and start making it do what I want to do, this only lasts for what seems like a very short time before I start feeling like I'm awake. And then, I am awake. Is this supposed to happen when lucid dreaming?

2. Even when having a bad dream, I often choose to turn to violence, inside the dream, and kill whatever is causing my bad dream. This seems odd to me, because normally I am not a violent person at all.

3. Sometimes in a lucid dream I experience a certain dread. I think that this dread comes from the fact that I'm aware that I'm in a dream, and because of that I'm aware that the dream could turn into a bad dream. Any time this happens I always choose to wake up, because I fear being in the lucid dream and not being able to get out and being stuck, aware, in a nightmare. Which would of course be much worse than having a normal, non-lucid dream nightmare.

4. Other times, I am somehow... aware that I'm asleep, when I'm not dreaming. I am aware of where I'm at, but I can't move at all. And its difficult to wake up. I just lay there, thinking about how I'm stuck. But at any time during this, I can choose to stop thinking about it and actually go to normal sleep. I find this to be pretty strange. What is it? Sometimes I even realize that I'm uncomfortable, and that I'd like to shift positions as we so often do in our sleep. But I am paralyzed, and I can't move. If I try really hard sometimes, I feel like I have moved. Only to wake up and find that I didn't move at all. I don't understand what all this is. In order to come out of it, I have to go back to "sleep", and then I will almost always wake up seconds later and be able to move around.